USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Performing the Demonic: Witchcraft, Skepticism and Gender Constructions in Michel de Montaigne\u27s "De la force de l\u27imagination" and "Des Boyteux."
Get PDFIn both essays, the textual representation of the processes that govern communal attitudes is accompanied by the narrative enactment of the fashioning of male selfhood and identity which concentrates on sexual psychopathology and is deeply rooted in the Renaissance discourse of sexuality and gender identity. In Montaigne\u27s apparently skeptical account of demonic agency the figure of the witch not only turns out to be an emblem that epitomizes central attitudes and practices structuring the field of cultural exchange but also serves as a model for the male subject\u27s relation to woman, which leads to a reformulation of the narrative project underlying the writing process
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
Anybody\u27s Concerns II continues the exploration of artistic, medical and cultural practices and discourses regarding gendered bodies initiated in our recent issue Anybody\u27s Concerns
Review: Jeffrey Weeks: Sexuality. Second Edition.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
For this new edition of his classic Sexuality, British historical sociologist Jeffrey Weeks updated and rewrote every chapter in order to include new issues that have emerged in the past twenty years (such as newer debates on gay marriage) - a period within which sexuality has turned into a mainstream topic. But Weeks also points out that his views have not changed since the first edition was published in 1986. The main point of his book remains the same: It is an argument against the idea of "sexuality" as something only "natural." The book facilitates access to complex theories. Weeks provides a good overview over different ways of conceptualizing sexuality within social sciences; one of his main purposes is to denaturalize sexuality: "Yet it is the task of sociology and the other social sciences to \u27deconstruct\u27 naturalism, and to determine how actions are given their meaning and significance via social interaction" (VII)
Trials of Rituals: Female Bonding and the Colonial "Other" in Marianne Wiggins\u27s John Dollar
Get PDFMy claim is that by projecting backwards into the past present homophobic and xenophobic attitudes, Wiggins makes a forceful attempt in reassessing their roots in colonial literature. The context Wiggins reexamines addresses above all the silenced subject matter of interracial lesbian desire. Does this imply that John Dollar is a \u27lesbian text?\u27 What is a lesbian text, after all? The willingness to decipher a hidden subtext or to engender an ending that is not the anticlimactic hoax, which the \u27failed\u27 solution of John Dollar at first glance seems to be, envisions a lesbian narrative space of transgression. It is from this focus that I attempt to queerly read Wiggins\u27s resignifying narrative strategies as means to undermine the master plot which, as Farwell puts it, \u27is not just androcentric or phallocentric, it is also basically heterosexual\u27 (95)
Wanda\u27s Endings: Transforming the Discourse of Masochism
No full textI want to show that the scenario of male masochism as displayed in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch\u27s novella has less to do with the actual pleasure that is felt during physical punishment than with the prescriptive construction of a position for the female subject that is inspired by the iconographic tradition of Venus paintings. The scenes in the novella which include the African servants provide a metonymical tie to the iconography of the cruel woman prescribed by the masochistic fantasy. In my reading of the text, however, the scenes that include the African servants mark, at the same time, the exit of the cruel woman from the masochistic scenario and the entrance into the psychic economy of sadism which follows a completely different dynamics and which disempowers the male masochist and his control over Venus in Furs. When Rümelin as Wanda von Sacher-Masoch begins to write novellas herself, her cruel women no longer subject themselves to the space and location afforded to them within the male fantasy
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
Illuminating Gender examines the interface of gender and disease, a thematic concern that will be taken up again in Illuminating Gender II next year. Two of the contributions to our first issue consider the interaction of medical theory and German literature in the eighteenth as well as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while the third target essay focuses on the Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome that troubles notions of normative femininity
Review: Margaret Sönser Breen and Warren J. Blumfeld, eds.: Butler Matters: Judith Butler\u27s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
The title\u27s witty declaration "Butler matters" in combination with Butler\u27s portrait as frontispiece, and the collection\u27s final sentence that confirms, "the lesbian and gay movement needs, among its advocates, scholars like Judith Butler" (204), suggests more dedication than Breen and Blumfeld\u27s collection of essays actually has. Although the majority of the thirteen articles maintains the importance of Butler\u27s thinking for a number of disciplines, among which Feminist and Queer Studies are only the most prominent ones, Vicky Kirby\u27s and Kirsten Campbell\u27s contributions probe into inadequacies and inconsistencies of Butler\u27s theory.